Date:

Wednesday, September 12, 2018, 3:00pm to 4:30pm

Location:

1 Brattle, 4th floor, suite 470, Harvard Kennedy School

Samer Hassan joins digital HKS for a brown bag entitled, Can Blockchain Facilitate the Governance of Commons-oriented Communities?In this talk, he will explore the potential of blockchain to facilitate governance and work of commons-oriented communities.

Presentation summary:Blockchain’s hype has brought up many narratives around its potentials — narratives which are typically techno-deterministic, market-driven and follow a Sillicon Valley perspective. However, what can blockchain bring to the commons-oriented communities, if anything? How the issues around algorithmic governance, infrastructure control, transparency, trust, or tokenization, may affect these communities? Can these blockchain features help — or hinder — the communities governance? In this talk, Samer Hassan will explore the potentials of blockchain to facilitate the work of these communities. He will explain Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing A Commons, and analyze how blockchain can contribute to each of them.

This is part of his team work in P2P Models, a EU-funded large project to build decentralized, democratic and economically sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy.

Focused on decentralized collaboration, he received a 1.5M€ ERC grant to build blockchain-based democratic and economically sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy (“P2P Models” project). Coming from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, he has 50+ publications in those fields. In the EU-funded P2Pvalue project, he coordinated building decentralized free/open source web-tools for collaborative communities and social movements, such as SwellRTand Jetpad. He’s an accredited grassroots facilitator and has experience in multiple communities and grassroots initiatives.

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